The Higher Education Academy and IASPM (UK and Ireland branch) are sponsoring a one day workshop on Popular Music Pedagogy. The workshop takes place at the University of Edinburgh on Friday 24 January 2014. Registration is free but space is limited so book now to avoid disappointment.

Developing curriculums and pedagogical approaches to the teaching of Punk music is a poorly investigated area within Music in Higher Education. The growing capability for institutions to develop programmes in these popular music areas have led to an appropriation of traditional teaching methods in some areas and innovative groundbreaking processes in others. The aim of this edited volume is to capture the contemporary thinking and doing of teaching practitioners around the world exploring their practice as punk pedagogues.

Organized by:
Inter-Asia Popular Music Studies Group (IAPMS group),
College of Arts, Media and Technology, Chiang Mai, Thailand

We are pleased to announce the 4th Inter-Asia Popular Music Studies Conference, which will take place on August 8-9, 2014 in Chiang Mai, in collaboration with College of Arts, Media and Technology, Chiang Mai University, Thailand. Following the first conference in Osaka in 2008, the second conference in Hong Kong in 2010, and the third conference in Taipei in 2012, we move our next meeting to Thailand—hub of vibrant Southeast Asian popular music and music industry.

Joint Study Day of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology and the Royal Musical AssociationUniversity of Manchester, Friday 11 April 2014

Including invited papers by Byron Dueck (Open University) and Estelle Joubert (Dalhousie University and University of Oxford), this joint BFE/RMA Study Day seeks to bring together researchers to engage in interdisciplinary discussions about the relationship between music, circulation, and the public sphere.

Notions of the public sphere, as laid out by Jürgen Habermas, depict it as a site falling between private lives and governmental authority, where individuals meet to engage in critical, rational debate about public issues. Such discussions occur via face to face meetings as well as through the circulation of media. Historically speaking, these media have tended to be primarily literary but scholars are increasingly turning their attention to the role played by music and sound in the formation of public culture. There have also been a number of attempts to rethink the notion of the public sphere itself, with talk of ‘counterpublics’ (Michael Warner) and ‘intimate publics’ (Lauren Berlant), in addition to various reassessments of the public/private divide. These ideas have been taken up and adapted across analyses of jazz, popular music, the Proms, religious sermons, opera and hymnbooks.